Eye Opening

I have (very slowly) been working my way through the Lightbringer series by author Brent Weeks. I've blogged about the first two books -- and though it gets harder to share spoiler-free thoughts about the series as I get deeper in, I thought some kind of post was in order for book three, The Broken Eye.

This book sees a powerful major character brought low even as another character is learning to tap their own potential power (both magically and as a leader). One character bristles against restrictions imposed upon her for reasons she doesn't understand, while another character struggles to honor her own principles as she's both recruited and coerced by a shadowy organization.

The world of the Lightbringer remains an interesting one, though by this third book, it does seem as though Brent Weeks has fleshed it out to near full potential. (It's all about narrative now, with little "table setting.") That's okay; the light-and-color-based magic system may no longer be novel, but enough story arcs are now at play that such inventiveness is no longer required.

At least two of those story arcs seemed especially compelling to me in this book. Teia was first introduced in book two, and feels like the most important character in the story to me by this third volume. She seems to be at the most risk -- some by choice, some unavoidably -- and is the least confident in her own abilities to overcome that risk. Elsewhere in the book, Karris White Oak is on a slow journey of her own (perhaps too slow, at times), but it builds steadily to an exciting climax that tees things up wonderfully for the next book.

Though this series has bucked certain conventions of fantasy fiction at times, this book does not do so for its main protagonist, Kip. Having given himself five books to work with, Brent Weeks did not have to chart a direct "hero's journey" for the character; the greater space allowed more room for false starts, "side quests," and setbacks. But by this book, it certainly seems as though Kip is the sort of character archetype we expected him to be from the very beginning. I don't resent indulging such tropes in just one part of a sprawling volume, but nevertheless, this story line isn't really one of my favorite elements of the book.

Someone who seems not to be on a hero's journey is Gavin Guile. Over books one in two, he was clearly shown to have a dark side. We learned of his secrets, and suspect he has even more yet to be revealed. Though he did some heroic things, it doesn't seem that we were ever meant to think of him as a good guy. That said, he certainly spends this book being punished. He may well deserve it, but it becomes almost monotonous how he bounces from one misery to another. And it doesn't seem to be in an "act two, all is lost" sort of way that falls in the middle of most stories, either. I'm not sure how much more torture I can stand to see visited on one character -- not out of my feelings for that character, but out of the distastefulness of the repeated depictions.

All that said, I still enjoyed the book overall, and I still remain committed to finishing the series. Listening to them in audiobook format as I have been, and with each volume being a true doorstop of a tome, it's going to take a while. But I'm now past the halfway point, with just two more books to go. I give The Broken Eye a B+. And I suppose I'll be back later in the year with a few thoughts on book four.

Picard: Disengage

Sometimes, an episode of television entertains with surprises that thwart expectation. Sometimes, it can entertain just by giving you exactly what you expect. The second episode of Star Trek: Picard season three was more of the latter.

Picard and Riker learn more about Jack, Beverly's son, as all three face off with the menacing Vadic. Even a possible rescue by the Titan may not be enough to save them from the terrifying firepower of Vadic's ship. Meanwhile, Raffi pursues an investigation into the quantum tunneling attack -- even as her handler warns her off, and even at great personal cost.

In many ways, this episode was a long walk to get to exactly where you assumed it was going. I didn't find that made the journey unsatisfying, per se... though I did occasionally feel like, with only 10 episodes overall in this season overall: shouldn't we be picking up the pace a little?

I think everyone knew that Beverly's son Jack would be revealed as Jean-Luc's son too. In a season that's about The Next Generation crew reuniting, there's really just no interesting story to be found in Jack having any other father. The fact that it took until the end of the episode for us to get to the full revelation of that might have been a little too tedious... but we did get some great moments along the way. Riker needling Picard about "not seeing it" felt pitch perfect. And the wordless exchange of looks between Beverly and Jean-Luc was appropriately dramatic.

Jack himself was set up as a roguish character. Ed Speleers clearly has that gear as an actor, but we'll need to see more than swagger as the season goes on. How his character is ultimately written to work with the team is going to weigh heavily on how successful the character is overall. (But I do have one question: are we supposed to think his British accent is like... genetic or something?)

Another expected element of the story was the introduction of a major villain. Still, Vadic made a great impression thanks to a delicious performance by actress Amanda Plummer. We know from Pulp Fiction that she could have come in here screaming and spitting venomous rage all over the screen. Instead, she gives us a a villain who's chilling because it's clear how much delight she takes in all of this. The way she toyed with our heroes, toyed with her words, cast her much in the same mold as the villain played by her father Christopher in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I look forward to more from her in the episodes ahead.

Raffi's subplot in the episode was perhaps the least engaging element of the story, for all the tropes it drew upon. On the one hand, I do appreciate them using her backstory of addiction and obsession. On the other hand, the choice force upon her by her ex-husband felt weirdly villainous, and I wasn't exactly a fan of the "do drugs to prove to me you're not a cop" trope.

On the other hand, this same subplot gave us some thrills too. Star Trek got its first notable Ferengi in some time in the form of Sneed. He served up nastiness with a side of Slug-O Cola in an effective way: sometime fun in the manner of a Quark-type character, but with enough gangster attitude to feel reasonably dangerous. And of course, he led to the arrival of Worf in the plot. You probably guessed that Worf would be Raffi's handler, noting the talk of being a "warrior" in the first episode and cross-referencing with Next Gen characters yet to be seen. Still, it was immensely satisfying to see Worf show up and kick ass. (Violently taking advantage of the fact that this would not run on broadcast television.)

Side note: showrunner Terry Matalas gave 12 Monkeys fans more to revel in: one of Jack's aliases was "James Cole" (the main character of that show), and Sneed's drug was called "splinter" (the time travel technology from that show). Then, bridging both those references, Sneed was played by actor Aaron Stanford, who played James Cole in the series!

I would have wished for a faster pace, but the story is still moving here, and I certainly want to see where it goes next. I give "Disengage" a B.

When Narrative Conventions Kaleid(oscope)

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul created a legion of fans for actor Giancarlo Esposito. I'd count myself as one, open to checking out any movie or show he's in, simply because he's in it. That was how the Netflix show Kaleidoscope first came onto my radar: as a new, limited-run, 8-episode series starring Esposito. And about a heist! Count me in. But it turns out that "show starring the indelible villain from Breaking Bad" was by far the lesser of the two big marketing hooks for Kaleidoscope. The more prominent one was the gimmicky premise of the show itself.

Each of Kaleidoscope's 8 episodes is named for a color, and takes place in a specific point in the timeline surrounding a grand heist. The episode about the heist itself (White) comes last, after you've watched 7 preceding episodes setting up a web of context. But those 7 episodes are meant to be watched in any order. If the device you stream on supports Netflix's seldom-used "pathing technology," then Kaleidoscope will actually be served to you in a random order. And some quick math (7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2) determines that this makes for 5,040 different possible sequences in which this story might unfold.

I admit that this gimmick tantalized me. I had thoughts of Firefly on steroids. That show had to efficiently introduce all of its characters three times: in a pilot episode, a second pilot made after the network refused to air the original one first, and lastly in a feature film. If Kaleidoscope truly had 7 episodes that could all be "watched first," that would seem to mean that it had effectively 7 pilot episodes, all of which also had to serve to keep people already watching the series engaged. Tantalizing! In interviews, series creator Eric Garcia spoke of how different viewing orders might give you sympathy for different characters, make certain connections seem more potent, and more. It sounded very cool!

Cool as it sounds, it's not a concept that Kaleidoscope pulls off effectively. Watching episodes in a random order does a few things, but I think none of them match Garcia's stated goals, and none of them feel very good. You have to work much harder to hold the entire narrative in your head. It all but requires you to binge in the way Netflix demands, because the out-of-chronological details blur if you let too much time pass between episodes.

Whatever order you happen to get also heavily controls how fast you will make plot connections. I don't mean how soon you'll "guess the ending," but how quickly you'll actually learn what's important to each character, and which relationships matter most in the narrative. I found this to hurt the show rather than help it; part of being drawn into a good story is to understand and take interest in its characters, and that may or may not happen here with Kaleidoscope, depending on your viewing order.

There is a good story somewhere here, I'm pretty sure. I did find the final episode to be satisfying, but I believe that the particular order I watched in made it less satisfying to me than it might have been. It's simple math. There are 5,040 writer-sanctioned story orders here. That's a staggering number, and it's just not possible that they "playtested" all of them. Surely one could plot these options on a chart, and I'd wager that chart would take the form of a bell curve: many episode orders will be "fine," a handful will be "great," and another handful will be truly "bad."

Why leave that to chance? Why not do what writers have always done before and curate an order that gives the audience the best chance at a good experience? You can still tell the story out of order if you like; plenty of writers have done that, and sometimes with wonderful results. (See Memento.) But even in an out of order narrative, you can reveal information in a sequence that builds audience investment, benefits character empathy, and more. And I think it absolutely should have been done here.

Here is the order in which I watched Kaleidoscope: 1) Green; 2) Yellow; 3) Red; 4) Pink; 5) Orange; 6) Violet; 7) Blue; 8) White. And at the end of it all, I'd grade that experience a C; I would not recommend watching it the way I did. However, I suspect that an "average" experience watching Kaleidoscope would probably rate a B- (if you like the heist subgenre). And there are probably orders of watching it that might boost it to as high as a B+.

So if you haven't watched Kaleidoscope already and are game to try, I'm going to offer two suggestions. First, here's the order I would recommend. I probably haven't nailed the "single best order" out of 5,040 possibilities, but I'd be willing to say it's probably in the "top 10% possible": 1) Yellow; 2) Violet; 3) Green; 4) Orange; 5) Blue; 6) Red; 7) Pink; 8) White. Now it's worth noting that this order is rather close to chronological. It does incorporate some "flashbacks," but in a way that I think will illuminate character relationships in an orderly sequence that I wish had happened for me.

That said, it's pretty clear that the creator and writers of Kaleidoscope didn't want an order that's as "conventional" as the one I just proposed. So here's a second option you might try: 1) Blue; 2) Red; 3) Green; 4) Yellow; 5) Violet; 6) Orange; 7) Pink; 8) White. There's more of the narrative chaos in there that I believe the creators were after, but I still think that it would introduce key information in an order that will help the story by making the characters matter.

It's always been a given in watching a movie or TV series that a person's own life experience will inform the entertainment, making it so the exact same thing that thrills one person will repel another. It turns out that it's not a particularly smart idea (I think) to bake into the experience itself the possibility that we can't compare reactions because we didn't even see the same thing.

Talking Points

Of the 10 nominees for this year's Academy Award for Best Picture, Women Talking was not the last one I saw; in fact, I caught it several weeks ago. But I decided after watching it that I wasn't going to blog about it... until and unless I'd seen all 9 of the other contenders. That's because I didn't think that my opinion -- a largely negative one -- actually mattered.

Women Talking is writer-director Sarah Polley's adaptation of a novel by Miriam Toews. The story in both mediums is inspired by real-life events in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. (The movie is vague about exactly where it takes place, though when is given to audience at one point: 2010.) The story is straightforward: after years of sexual abuse at the hands of the men in their community, the women band together to decide on a response: fight back, or leave their home.

At the core of this story are true horrors, an emotionally charged blend of sexism and abuse and control. So I found it quite jarring how oddly formal and heightened the film itself was. At every turn, this feels like a stage play. The often prim language would feel right at home in the theater. The dramatic construction of a half-dozen-or-so characters together in one room to resolve one issue is bread-and-butter for playwrights. The venue of a barn loft could easily be suggested by a stage set that presented the environment in a spartan manner, matching the tone of the piece.

Now one could argue that this unusual formality is realistic -- for a religiously homogeneous community in general, and for the oppressed women in it specifically. You could also argue the formalism as the artistic choice of a writer-director wielding their authorial control over their movie; you can take it or leave it. But I must choose "leave it"; I felt like the movie kept me at arm's length the entire time, and that felt to me at odds with the subject matter.

Yet the title of the movie rang in my ears as I walked out of the theater. This is Women Talking. There is, appropriately, just one male character of note in the film -- and he spends the entire movie, appropriately, sublimating his own thoughts and feelings to those of the women around him. He's also played by openly gay actor Ben Whishaw, further underlining a key point here: that what any man thinks about this isn't at issue, no matter what their relationship to women. So I was planning to do I was told: keep quiet and let the women talk.

But now here we are: I've seen (and written about) every other Best Picture nominee this year -- something I don't always manage, and harder still to do in a year with 10 nominees. In that context, not writing about Women Talking seemed bad, as though to imply "oh, that movie about the Women Talking; yeah, no, I wanted to see everything else, but not that one."

There are good performances all over this movie -- most critically from Rooney Mara and Claire Foy (though Jessie Buckley is also strong in a supporting role). Frances McDormand is here for a weirdly minor performance... but as she co-produced the movie, it would seem she chose that for herself. Really, the whole cast is good... within the odd sense of regimented and theatrical behavior that Sarah Polley seems to have been deliberately going for.

So I'll just close by saying that this movie didn't work for me. And that doesn't matter. I'm curious to hear from others who might have seen it, but it's the kind of arthouse-centric release that hasn't widely been seen. Still... I'll sit back and wait for others to talk.

Voyager Flashback: In the Flesh

Aliens with the ability to shapeshift set their sights on infiltrating Earth! You might think I'm describing an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Wrong! It's Star Trek: Voyager's "In the Flesh."

When Voyager comes upon an incredibly accurate alien simulation of Starfleet Academy, they need to find out what its creators might be up to. But when they learn that this is the work of the deadly Species 8472, the crisis becomes existential. Is this a prelude to war, with 8472 learning to masquerade as human? Or in true Starfleet fashion, might there be some avenue for diplomacy?

If I'd had to guess where the spark behind this episode came from, I would have said the writers wanted to revisit Species 8472 without blowing the budget on CG monsters. I would have been wrong. Apparently, the story sparked from the notion that various demons and devils from Earth culture were actually 8472 aliens visiting throughout history. But, unable to crack what sort of long-term plan 8472 might have for Earth, or how Voyager could possibly figure into that, the writers found their way into this story about 8472 learning to behave as human for the sake of undercover reconnaissance.

The problem is, Deep Space Nine already thoroughly mined this space with shapeshifting Founders. That series devoted multiple episodes to exploring the paranoia, misdirection, and threats posed by an enemy that can "invade" you without you even knowing it. Voyager simply doesn't have anything new to add on the subject. And given that it feels like quite a stretch for the massive, alien 8472 beings to contort into another form and act human, it feels ill-advised to even try.

Perhaps the sense that they had to be different from Deep Space Nine is what informed some of the bizarre choices in the plot. The training ground has the vibes of one of those tourist traps where everyone pretends its the 1700s and is never supposed to break character. The cross-species romance between Chakotay and a member of Species 8472 is more than a little creepy. The rules in play strain credulity. (There's a simulated Boothby, but no other would-be infiltrators impersonating actual people? They know all this about Earth, but don't know that Voyager is completely cut off from it?)

The ending of this episode comes awfully easy. Amid a level of mistrust that Tom Paris likens to the Cold War, everyone meets and a room and works everything out in a single scene. I guess that's the Star Trek way, so fine. But if a real peace is established here, why doesn't Janeway ask for help returning to the Alpha Quadrant? If Species 8472 has a way of getting there (and if they don't, why this training to infiltrate Earth?), then can't they use it to transport Voyager?

Still, the episode does have its charms -- mostly in the outstanding guest cast assembled. It was a joy to see Ray Walston as Boothby on The Next Generation, and it's a joy to see him again here. Tucker Smallwood is a working actor who appeared multiple times on Enterprise after this; he's perfectly cast as a stern Admiral. Zach Galligan, best known for Gremlins, appears as an ill-fated trainee. And Valerie Archer, Chakotay's love interest, is none other than Kate Vernon, who would go on to play one of the most significant recurring roles on Battlestar Galactica. Any one of these four would have made a mark on this episode; that there's room for all of them to do so feels almost like a magic trick.

Other observations:

• When Chakotay gets his picture taken with Boothby, Boothby tells the cadet "don't cut off our heads." Looking at where the sight line on the screen falls across the image, that's exactly what happens.

• Seven of Nine gets a new costume in this episode, a two-tone blue and grey suit.

• Janeway tells Species 8472 that they haven't spoken to Starfleet in years, which is completely wrong. Indeed, they've traded information with Starfleet via the Hirogen communications network, so Starfleet actually should know something about Species 8472. (Though the defense against the species is Borg nanoprobes, and maybe they don't have any of those?)
  

One of the best guest casts ever assembled for a single episode of Star Trek: Voyager makes this plenty watchable. But the plot feels like ground well-traveled by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the specifics don't stand up to any kind of scrutiny. I give "In the Flesh" a B-.

Quantum Leap?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe kept chugging along this past weekend with the arrival of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Marvel fans are hurling rotten tomatoes at Rotten Tomatoes, which has dubbed it only the second MCU movie after Eternals to be "rotten." Inasmuch as I found this movie much far more fun than the ponderous Eternals, I agree with them. But I certainly didn't think it was "good."

Quantumania is an mammoth-sized journey down into the atom-sized quantum realm -- bold and colorful and action-packed... but disappointingly light on character, and utterly devoid of logic. It looks pretty great. Maybe the visuals seem cribbed from Strange World at times, but they're fairly impressively blended with the live-action elements. There are cool-looking character designs, both for human actors in makeup and more wild-looking CG creations. The color palette uses every shade in a Pantone swatch set, but still looks unified and coherent.

But the two title characters, Ant-Man and the Wasp, do basically nothing until the last act. Paul Rudd spends most of the movie running in front of a green screen from things he can't really see, a victim of circumstance rather than an agent of narrative. Evangeline Lilly is dragged along in tow of a story focused entirely on Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas's characters. Granted, that's an upgrade in some ways, as Pfeiffer and Douglas have the long careers to prove they have more screen presence than their co-star; still, they're not really suppose to outshine the (ostensibly) lead characters here.

There are some other side characters who shine without seizing control of the movie so distractingly. William Jackson Harper's comedic gifts are put to great use as the telepath Quaz. Kathryn Newton is enjoyable enough as Cassie Lang. (But if she's part of the "next generation" of characters, as this movie clearly implies, there seems to me to be a charisma gap between her and Hailee Steinfeld, Florence Pugh, or Iman Vellani.) Jonathan Majors seems more than capable of anchoring the MCU as main baddie for a while -- though I find him far more chilling in "quiet rage" mode than in the "shouting maniac" mode he increasingly embraces in the movie's final act.

The big problem here, though, is a story that makes no sense. And I don't mean all the (considerable) technobabble about the quantum realm and the multiverse. I watch science fiction; I can hang. It's that Roger Rabbit seems to have been the dramaturg of this script. ("You mean you could have done that at any time?" "Not any time. Only when it was dramatic!") The villain shows powers halfway through the movie that he simply stops using for the big showdown. The heroes roll out powers in that same showdown even though nothing seems to have been stopping them from doing so earlier. Characters who would prove really useful in key moments go missing, because their presence would offer inconveniently convenient solutions to problems that are meant to be challenging.

Such transparent cultivation of jeopardy makes the entire story feel like it has no meaningful stakes. But of course, it doesn't have meaningful stakes; we're just getting start with a new "phase" of the MCU, and we're laying track that won't carry traffic for two to three more years.

Would you divide your Marvel movie rankings into thirds? Quarters? Either way, I think Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is clearly in the bottom tier. I suppose it's faint praise to say that I'd still give it a C-. (If this is approaching the floor for Marvel movies, it's a reasonably high floor.) But it's a shame that this seems like "must-see" Marvel in terms of setting up the story to come, because it feels like one of the more easily skippable movies of the franchise in every other respect.

Picard: The Next Generation

The final season of Star Trek: Picard has begun with the cheekily titled "The Next Generation."

Picard receives a call for help from Beverly Crusher, with whom he has not spoken in 20 years. Warned to be careful with trust, Picard can only seek help from Riker to reach the edge of Federation space. Meanwhile, Raffi is on a mission of her own, working undercover to prevent the attack of a deadly new weapon.

Show runner Terry Matalas has said his goal with this season of Star Trek: Picard is to give The Next Generation cast a proper send-off in the form of a sort of 10-hour long movie. Time will tell if he nailed the "proper send-off" part, but the "10-hour long movie" part feels true already. Even serialized television often includes a stand-alone subplot or an episodic theme within each hour. Not "The Next Generation"; I really did feel like I was approaching "act two" of a movie when the projector simply went out, forcing me to wait a week for more. And to cement the "movie vibe": all of Jerry Goldsmith's themes from First Contact were brought back to form the spine of the musical score by Stephen Barton (a Terry Matalas TV veteran from 12 Monkeys).

I'm not usually one to binge-watch episodes of a single TV show, but I certainly would have fired up another episode here if I could have. This first installment was just so perfectly calibrated to tantalize. On the one hand, it doesn't make longtime fans wait; the episode opens immediately with a beloved character we haven't seen in ages. On the other hand, we only get Beverly Crusher, and then a satisfying team-up of Picard and Riker; to get the rest of the gang, you'll have to stay tuned.

Still, there was a lot of fun to be had already with just half the original Next Generation cast. Gates McFadden gets to play action hero in a sequence that tells us just how high the stakes are for Beverly Crusher even before we begin to learn more context at the end of the episode. Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes have great rapport throughout a caper that plays with their friendship and their age in satisfying ways.

Fortunately, it's not just the Next Generation vets that get all the good moments. While it's too bad that Raffi was siloed all alone (for now) in her own subplot, the "quantum tunneling" weapon she was chasing turned out to be appropriately apocalyptic when we saw it in action. Seven of Nine had a nice subplot about bristling against Starfleet regulations, personified in the form of the perfectly obnoxious Captain Shaw (played to the hilt by another 12 Monkeys veteran, actor Todd Stashwick).

For pulling me in, and making an hour breeze by, I give "The Next Generation" a B+. I can't wait to see what happens next.

The Lighter Side of Fantasy

Back in 1988, the movie Willow arrived at just the right time for me, at just the right age, to absolutely love it -- probably to an irrational degree. I was old enough to go to a movie without an adult (if I could get a ride), but still young enough that I still had many storytelling and moviemaking tropes to encounter for the first time.

In recent years, as I re-encountered various 80s entertainment I loved at the time -- only to discover how truly weak much of it was -- I resolved not to revisit Willow. I could still quote half the movie from memory, I'd seen it so many times. Better to sit with my memory of it than re-watch it and shatter any illusions.

But now there's another way for me to "revisit" Willow, via the Disney+ television series that picks up the story years later. The prince of Tir Asleen has been abducted by evil forces, and his sister has resolved to rescue him. The child of prophecy, Elora Danan, now a young adult, is swept up in a new adventure with the Nelwyn Willow Ufgood.

The creative forces behind Willow the series know that you know that the movie was kind of a cheesy 80s movie. So they've resolved to amplify that approach and create a show that skewers fantasy tropes even as it enthusiastically embraces them. An episode of Willow can only take itself seriously for so long before it seems to break out in an allergic reaction, making a joke or cracking (if not breaking) the fourth wall.

No other fantasy series has its young cast use real-world slang. No other fantasy series would dream of using needle drops, songs that you absolutely know the words to, that could tear you away from the world building. No other fantasy series so emphatically refuses to be grimdark in its sensibilities. You could scarcely make a more irreverent and simply "fun" fantasy show short of making, say, The Princess Bride: The TV Series. All of this makes Willow a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of "prestige television" you're probably watching right now. On a heavy night when you're not quite ready to face the newest episode of The Last of Us, I guarantee you are emotionally ready to tackle an episode of Willow.

Yet even as this wildly different tone is an asset for show, it can be something of a liability at times too. Willow finished airing its first season weeks ago, but it's taken me this long to reach the end because it's never the show I want to watch first. Sometimes, its lightness edges into corniness. The wild cameo appearances in some episodes often overwhelm the serialized storytelling. And that storytelling is truly not all that engaging; as unconventional as the overall tone can be, the core story is as conventional and straight up the middle as it comes.

It's nice to see Warwick Davis back in a starring role (though it's quite possible I feel that largely out of nostalgia for the original film). Amar Chadha-Patel is a hell of a lot of fun as the swaggering character of Boorman -- a new swordmaster/roguish proxy for a character from the original film. (Val Kilmer's cancer prevents his return here.) But the rest of the cast doesn't necessarily pop as much as their characters do; for example, it's a welcome tweak to fantasy conventions that the core romantic subplot here is a lesbian relationship.

Ultimately, I liked Willow and I'm glad I watched it. Yet at the same time, a season two renewal has yet to be announced, and I can't say I'd be especially disappointed if that didn't happen. I'd give the season a... B, perhaps? If my own nostalgia is affecting that mark, then the show probably isn't for most people. On the other hand, if you -- like me -- are a bit weary of fantasy being so damn serious all the time, you might find Willow a welcome departure.

Voyager Flashback: Extreme Risk

On any long-running episodic television series, a smart writing staff will check in on their actors to ask them what they think might be going on with their characters. Such a conversation with Roxann Dawson reportedly led to the B'Elanna-centric episode "Extreme Risk."

In secret, B'Elanna Torres is using the holodeck with the safety protocols turned off, to engage in increasingly dangerous activities. She's ever more withdrawn in her work, which becomes clear as the crew starts to build a new shuttlecraft for an unusual mission. Will Voyager beat an alien rival in retrieving a probe from deep within a gas giant? And will B'Elanna cause serious injury to herself before seeking help?

The writer of this episode, Kenneth Biller, credits Roxann Dawson with suggesting the topic of self-harm and depression. He noted that Voyager's take on the issue had to have a science fiction element; that's how he came to involve the holodeck in his script. The result is a mixed bag, though.

The characterization of B'Elanna in this episode feels well-considered. She's escalated to this daredevil state, and is numb and emotionless everywhere else in her life. We've known the character long enough that we can see how her fire has gone out. She tries to deflect uncomfortable conversation with half-hearted humor, she's pushing Tom Paris away, and she doesn't get angry when Janeway gives her a dressing down. She's so desperate to feel something that she strikes up a conversation with Neelix (who is just as shocked at the prospect as the audience)!

It certainly feels right to follow up on last season's revelation (for the Voyager crew) that the Maquis movement in the Alpha Quadrant has been decimated. Losing that many close friends all at once -- made worse by not being able to be there -- sounds like a mighty emotional blow, and it's appropriate that at least one of the main characters would not be able to simply shrug that off.

It's also good that Chakotay is the one to start to bring B'Elanna out of her torpor. He's really the only other person who has experiences at all like what she's feeling. The fact that some of the Voyager regulars were once in the Maquis resistance feels like it hasn't actually mattered on the show in ages, but it matters here in a potent and organic way.

Yet there's a lot about this episode that feels out of step. How Chakotay gets B'Elanna to open up seems dangerous and irresponsible: physically manhandling her onto the holodeck and forcing her to directly confront the flashpoint of her trauma is surely not a recommended therapeutic technique. B'Elanna's subsequent turnaround after this one event feels sudden and unearned.

B'Elanna isn't the only character who is behaving oddly, and that only serves to detract from her story. Janeway is weirdly snippy for the whole episode; right out the gate, she has absolutely no patience for this rivalry with the Malon (and their captain in particular). Tom Paris should be there for his significant other, but in an especially bad look for the character, he'd rather spend his time building a "hot rod" (as Tuvok calls it). Sure, she's pushing him away -- and that's a thing that can happen -- but he should be trying harder not to be pushed! He doesn't seem disappointed enough in himself when Janeway and Chakotay start asking questions about B'Elanna and he realizes he doesn't have the answers.

Parallel to all this (and perhaps crowding out time for more character focus?) is a subplot about the construction of the Delta Flyer, the new shuttlecraft that would remain with the series for the rest of the run. There are some fun in-universe accents in the ship's design, such as the Captain Proton inspired controls to pilot it. But the real-world production reasons informing its appearance are even more significant. The larger space was much easier to film in with fewer camera setups, and allowed for multiple characters to be framed together from more angles. The "skylight" adds another element that has to be dealt with by visual effects, but that also allows for a lot more visual variety in a shot (when the money is there for it). This was a good expense for Voyager, the television production, even if it strains the logic of how Voyager, the resource-limited ship far from home, was able to build it.

Other observations:

• Orbital skydiving was meant to have been depicted in Star Trek: Generations, but the scene was cut from the final film. Reportedly, the skydiving suit B'Elanna wears was the same suit made for William Shatner for that movie. Heavily tailored, of course.
  

• Cliff Bole, a recurring figure in the Star Trek director's chair, seems to get a bit bored with the "same ol', same ol' " in this episode. There are some strange angles peppered throughout, and unusually dark lighting (particularly for the scene in Tom Paris' quarters).

• I guess they spent so much money building the Delta Flyer set that they didn't have much left for the effect of its hull buckling as B'Elanna races to repair it. It looks pretty much like someone pushing dents in aluminum foil.

• While Vorik doesn't really have anything important to do in this episode, it's nice to see minor characters repeat -- on Voyager especially, where the crew is supposed to be small and fixed.

It's great to see Roxann Dawson play B'Elanna Torres in a different gear. The premise of this episode is interesting. Yet the urge to fix everything in time for the final credits, paired with odd behavior by so many people around B'Elanna, blunts the impact of this story. I give "Extreme Risk" a B-.

Putting Up a Good Front

"War movies" are a very hit-and-miss genre for me. I've bounced off of a lot of the most highly-praised favorites of the genre, but have been impressed just often enough to keep trying them now and then. This year, one of the 10 Oscar nominees for Best Picture is a war movie -- a new take on a classic one, in fact: All Quiet on the Western Front.

I've never seen the 1930 American film, nor have I read the original novel translated from German (as many seem to have done in school). So my first exposure to the story was this new German-made film: Im Westen nichts Neues. Set largely in the final weeks of World War I, young soldier Paul Bäumer quickly loses his illusions and idealism when faced with the reality of trench warfare. This version of the story also adds what I understand to be a new subplot, tracking the negotiations and signing of the armistice that would end the war.

Renowned filmmaker François Truffaut once said that "every film about war ends up being pro-war." I think he's right that many war movies only present noble causes and exhilarating victories, to the extent that they become glitzy recruitment videos. Even war movies with a more skeptical outlook often end up celebrating things like the camaraderie between soldiers, or the way some heroic sacrifice brings some small bit of sense to senseless chaos. But if Truffaut is wrong, and a war movie can truly be anti-war, it's this one.

You would probably expect All Quiet on the Western Front to be a "tough watch." Let me tell you that it's even tougher than you think. This movie is almost relentlessly bleak. It shows how war is hell, over and over again. And in case you somehow miss that point, Daniel Brühl (likely the one actor familiar to an American audience) is there to say it explicitly in that added armistice subplot. Director Edward Berger takes the visceral brutality of the Omaha Beach opening of Saving Private Ryan, amplifies it, and extends it for two-and-a-half hours.

His key partner in this is actor Felix Kammerer, who stars as Bäumer. Kammerer seems to have a bottomless capacity to express utter horror, and to make the audience feel it right along with him. The rest of the cast is strong, but Kammerer's thousand-yard-stare is truly haunting.

Another strong element is an unusual but brutally effective score by Volker Bertelmann. On the one hand, this music sounds nothing like what you'd expect to accompany a dramatic war movie -- it growls and grinds, sounding almost industrial and better suited to science-fiction. Yet at the same time, it's ominous, dark, and oppressive: a perfect fit for this subject matter and overall message.

Thinking about how much I was moved by this movie, I couldn't help but think about it in comparison to the last big World War I movie that was up for an Oscar, 1917. I thought highly of that movie... but for entirely different reasons that feel borderline inappropriate now that I've seen this movie. 1917 was an eye-catching high-wire act of virtuosic filmmaking. But it's All Quiet on the Western Front that is (by far) the more effective movie on an emotional level. I give it an A-, and am revising my Top 10 List of 2022 to put in in the #2 slot.

Voyager Flashback: Drone

As effective as the Borg were as Star Trek baddies, the writers clearly knew that they were a well to be drawn from sparingly. The Next Generation kept things fresh with the more personal episode "I, Borg." Voyager's attempt at a vaguely similar tone came in "Drone."

When a transporter mishap brings together Seven of Nine's Borg nanoprobes with the Doctor's mobile emitter, the result is a futuristic Borg drone with incredibly advanced technology -- but it's a blank slate, carrying none of Collective's drive to assimilate. Seven sets out to teach the drone about the merits of humanity and individuality. Will it internalize these values before the Collective comes after them all?

Voyager seems to love a "these two characters are fused in a transporter accident" story; this episode is a Borg-themed "Tuvix." In some ways, it's more effective. Here, the affected parties are around to speak for themselves. Seven of Nine is usually the surly teenager (even at the start of this episode, when she basically yells at the Doctor for not knocking before coming into "her room"). But now she becomes a sort of adoptive mother, having to negotiate the emotions of a child wanting to know about their biological parents.

Yet there are other ways in which this episode falls short of "Tuvix." The Doctor's half of this "co-parenting" situation is hardly examined; he spends the episode basically negging Seven and peeping on B'Elanna in the shower before vanishing almost entirely from the story. It feels like not nearly enough weight is given to how dangerous this Borg drone could be, I guess because Janeway just wants a new "foster drone." Then there's actually a third character involved in this transporter merger, muddying the parental metaphor and adding nothing meaningful I can pinpoint. Never-before-seen Ensign Mulchaey has his DNA sampled to make the drone One, but we're not explicitly told that he survives being attacked, and then another actor plays the role of One. And in the end, instead of someone having to make a decision to resolve the situation (as Janeway did in "Tuvix"), the problem of this Borg drone basically resolves itself.

Still, there are a number of nice moments throughout the episode. B'Elanna being openly hostile to One, and then being won over, is an effective subplot. Seeing Harry Kim in command of the night shift is a rare but welcome moment for his character. The seed is planted for the construction of the new Delta Flyer shuttle. And the episode's bookends of Seven looking at her own reflection are a lovely way to highlight her emotional arc.

Other observations:

• You wouldn't turn on a sonic shower before getting into it, would you? It's not like it needs to warm up first.

• One's dialogue is a bit inconsistent: "I will comply" in one scene, but "we do not understand" in the next. And I don't think this is a deliberate choice meant to say something about his emerging individuality.
  

• A Borg "maturation chamber" makes its first appearance since the Enterprise found a "baby in a drawer" in the very first Borg episode. Also, the Borg sphere makes its first appearance outside the movie First Contact.
  

"Drone" isn't a bad episode, but I think it lives too much in the long shadow cast by The Next Generation's "I, Borg" for me to rate it too highly. I give it a B.

Triangulating

As society has grown increasingly critical of class divisions, the "eat the rich" sentiment has become more common in entertainment. One of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture is very specifically concerned with this topic, the black comedy Triangle of Sadness.

Carl, a model, and Yaya, an internet influencer, have a strained relationship. But they're together for now at least, and going on a week-long luxury cruise aboard a superyacht. Slightly sour experiences abound, but it all comes to a head on the night of the captain's dinner -- and gets much, much worse from there.

I've already told you more than I knew about this movie before I sat down to watch it, and I hesitated to detail even that much. That's because Triangle of Sadness doesn't just engage in class critique, but in another trend you see online a fair bit these days: the "at no point while watching this video did I know what was going to happen next" escalation.

There's a 20-minute stretch in the middle of this movie that was frankly shocking to me. It's not the sort of content you'd expect the Academy to endorse with an Oscar nomination, nor for the Cannes Film Festival to have awarded it with their top prize, the Palme d'Or. I imagine the critical praise comes from looking past that to Act Three, which is admittedly pretty great. In the last hour, this movie is at its most trenchant and most clever. You've already seen the wealthy and privileged brought low... only to learn that we've hardly reached the bottom yet.

But it takes an almost painfully long time to get there. There are 90 minutes preceding that, and I would cut 30 from that were I in charge of the edit. Writer-director Ruben Östlund has other sensibilities, however, which include letting a running gag run a very long time, and making sure every audience member is hyper-aware of his camera choices: awkward moves, and lingering on reactions more than dialogue. And they don't always seem to support or forward the action.

There are good performances, including Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean as the couple we follow into the wider story, and Woody Harrelson as the captain of the superyacht. But it's not until fairly late in the film that the real scene-stealer ascends: Dolly de Leon is excellent as Abigail (whose role is something better left to the viewer's discovery).

I had just about lost patience with this movie when it finally grabbed my attention and held it. But averaging that experience overall, I think I'd only come out on just this side of recommending it. I give Triangle of Sadness a B-. If you're "collecting the whole set" of Best Picture nominees this year, I would say it's one of the more enjoyable ones. But the oddsmakers seem to agree that it doesn't actually have a chance, so it's certainly one you can skip if you just want to see the "horses" truly in the race.

Voyager Flashback: Night

"Night" kicks off the fifth season of Star Trek: Voyager with an intriguing premise... which quickly gives way to a different premise. But do the "two episodes in one" work well together?

Voyager is crossing the Void, a region of true emptiness, with no stars or other phenomena. And with the expectation that they'll be there for two years, Janeway begins to doubt her decision that stranded them in the Delta Quadrant. But when they encounter aliens who use the Void as a waste dump, and other aliens affected by this destruction of their home, the crew finds a new cause to rally behind.

The writers of Voyager set themselves an impossible task here. "Monotony" is perhaps the hardest thing to dramatize for an audience, without actually engaging in numbing repetition. To do that would be the death of entertainment (and ratings) on a broadcast television show, so how deeply can we really get inside the notion that the crew have been traveling this Void for two months and are facing the prospect of two more years of it? Not very, of course.

Still, they do a pretty good job of showing us a crew on edge. We're confronted with the stark visual of black nothingness around the ship. Duty shifts on the bridge are thinly staffed. Characters have short fuses. Neelix is having panic attacks, and awakens from a nightmare to turn on all the lights. Chakotay goes to Tuvok for advice, with the latter noting how rare that is. Even Tuvok is affected, meditating in the astrometrics lab so that he can see the stars. People are fighting over the holodeck forcefully enough to break it. (OK, that last thing, I don't love so much. Paris and The Doctor seem childish.)

Most significantly, of course, Janeway is hiding out in her quarters, regretting the decision that trapped them all in the Delta Quadrant to start with. Janeway is so often written as maximally decisive (to the point of ignoring the advice of others) that I like seeing this human side of her, seeing that her resolve is not that steely. But it's less effective for me that the episode then aims to put her in the position of making the Caretaker decision all over again. This time, she gets to save the aliens and take the shortcut home. So it kind of doesn't matter that she was willing to sacrifice herself this time; it fundamentally isn't the "Caretaker choice" when you can have it both ways.

Layered in with these psychological elements is a good, old fashioned Star Trek allegory. An alien race is causing an ecological crisis, and they don't want to change their ways because doing so would threaten the backbone of their economy. While I appreciate how directly this story dramatizes a real-world issue, I'm a bit disappointed at how this muscles out all the more emotionally compelling dread of the first part of the episode -- simply being stuck in the Void. (After months in there of absolutely nothingness, now they encounter two alien races in the same day?)

Other observations:

• This episode marks the first appearance of the Captain Proton holodeck setting, a Flash Gordon send-up with deliberately cheesy visuals, music, and acting -- plus black-and-white photography. Fun as all that is (especially Seven of Nine's failure to get into the spirit of it), how does the holodeck keep working when power goes out all over the ship?
  

• At one point in this episode, Tom and B'Elanna play a game they call durotta. It's actually a real-world game, Quarto.

• Thirteeen(!) photon torpedoes are fired in this episode. Fastidious fans tracking the use of this limited resource note that this is the episode that crosses the line: more torpedoes have been fired than Voyager was said to originally have.
  

• The "Void aliens" are understandably sensitive to light. It might have been cool if they'd had no eyes or sense of vision at all.

There are sort of two episodes here in one, and I think they aren't perfectly harmonious together. Still, there are enough good pieces here that I'd give "Night" an effective B.

Gibson Explorer

I've long wanted to read something by author William Gibson, but the closest I'd ever come was listening to the audiobook presentation of his unproduced screenplay for Alien III. I still haven't crossed "reading Gibson" off the list, but along has come another way of getting one of his stories into my brain: the Amazon Prime television series, The Peripheral.

In the near future, Flynne Fisher is trying to scrounge cash to pay for her mother's medicine, and agrees to help her war veteran brother Burton by taking his place in a study for a new, highly realistic VR technology. But what they think is a game soon proves to be very real and deadly, and part of the shadowy agenda of factions from an even farther and dystopian future.

While I did not know the source material of this story -- this certainly is a compelling adaptation by series creator Scott B. Smith. The eight episodes of season one start out in compelling puzzle box fashion, with plenty of mysterious doors and every question answered sparking two new questions. (You might expect no less from a series executive produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the team who created Westworld.) But unlike many puzzle box shows, this doesn't feel like mysteries all the way down. There are truths here, and they are revealed -- and every time, the story manages to stay just as engaging.

The cast is excellent. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as Flynne, and perfectly navigates the wonder and emotion the story calls for in equal measure. (She also reminds you that, "oh yeah, she's been doing fight choreography since she was a child," making the action-adventure elements of the hit just as hard.) She could carry the entire show on her own, but doesn't have to; there are many talented performers here that you've probably seen somewhere else, depending on what you've watched. Gary Carr, Jack Reynor, Eli Goree, Melinda Page Hamilton, and Katie Leung have all been making the rounds for years. Meanwhile, the "I know you!" that hit me hardest was T'Nia Miller, who was memorable in The Haunting of Bly Manor and is excellent here as a menacing villain.

The whole season is full of exciting plot twists, high stakes, ratcheting tension, and scary adversaries. But I will say that the final episode of the season did seem just a bit off to me -- less clear and more convoluted than what had come before, and comparatively rushed for its run time. I suspect this is mostly to do with trying to leave things in a cliffhangery spot for a potential season 2... and I don't quite know how that intersects with the original source material. (The Peripheral is the first book of a trilogy in which the William Gibson hasn't yet published the final volume. And I have no idea if season one of the show represents book one, or some smaller section of it.)

Among the shows I've been watching lately, The Peripheral was the one I felt most excited about when sitting down for a new episode. So even though the season finale maybe stumbled a bit, and even though I'm nervous that Amazon Prime hasn't announced a renewal yet, I have to give the show an enthusiastic recommendation. I'd grade season one an A-, and I certainly hope we'll get more.

Voyager Flashback: Hope and Fear

For its fourth season finale, Star Trek: Voyager opted to forego the customary cliffhanger in favor of a one-off episode, "Hope and Fear."

When Voyager finally decodes a message from Starfleet, it leads them to an experimental starship, the Dauntless. Its quantum slipstream drive promises to get them back home to the Alpha Quadrant in a matter of months... if they're willing to abandon Voyager. But something doesn't seem right to Captain Janeway, and the alien cryptologist they've been working with may have something to do with it.

A tremendous amount of information about the making of this episode was made public, when the book Star Trek: Action! was published in 1998. It took fans behind the scenes of production on Star Trek: Insurrection, Deep Space Nine (for the episode "Tears of the Prophets"), and Voyager (for this episode). Even the highlights of the book, readily available on fan websites, could send one down a deep hole of exactly how this episode was initially conceived and how it transformed along the way.

An incredibly long story short, the kernel of inspiration here was to put Seven of Nine in command of another starship, in a clash of wills and technology against Janeway and Voyager. But the pace and budgetary restrictions of production, combined with no credible notion of how to build to that kind of conflict, transformed the idea into to what we got: Janeway and Seven at loggerheads as usual, but forced to work together to overcome an alien bent on their destruction.

There are some noteworthy elements to this episode. Foremost is a great guest star in veteran actor Ray Wise, who plays the alien Arturis. Wise plays at least three distinct modes for the character, and all work well. He seems genuinely helpful and not overly suspicious at the beginning, becomes a mustache-twirling villain when he springs his trap, and is ultimately a sympathetic and pitiable character when the reasons for his actions (and his final fate) are revealed.

The interactions between Janeway and Seven are good throughout. Seven starts out particularly petulant as the two play "Velocity" (a combination of skeet shooting, dodgeball, and racquetball?). Seven delivers a forceful monologue about how her values do not match those of the Voyager crew, before in the end coming to see herself as part of that crew. She has another great scene with B'Elanna, in which the two acknowledge that not-so-good things that might await them when they return to Earth.

Yet even if you aren't comparing "Hope and Fear" to the story idea that "might have been," it feels like a rather weak finale. It's ultimately yet another "way to get home quickly doesn't pan out" episode. And though it aims to showcase just how far Seven of Nine has come over the course of one year, the previous week's episode did exactly the same thing (and put her under far more pressure). Other characters besides Janeway and Seven of Nine are barely featured at all, and that sort of leads things to look like only Janeway suspects the trap being set for them here.

Other observations:

• The Dauntless does seem like it might be authentic; Majel Barrett is the voice of its computer, as with all Starfleet vessels.

• The Starfleet Admiral seen in the message from home is the same one in Star Trek: First Contact.
  

• It's rare for characters other than the captain to record a log entry on Star Trek, and basically unheard of to get more than one character doing so within a single episode. But here, we get interwoven entries from Janeway and Seven at the same time.

• This week in "don't scrutinize this too much": Voyager somehow catches up to the Dauntless after we were specifically told it couldn't, and then it fires four photon torpedoes, an incredible reduction of its supposedly limited supply.

There's good acting all over this episode, but unfortunately, it's mostly laboring to shore up a subpar script. I give "Hope and Fear" a B-.

And with that, I've reached the end of another season of Star Trek: Voyager. I would say it's the series' best season yet, mostly having to do with a run of stronger episodes involving a new alien race, the Hirogen. My picks for the top five of season four are "Living Witness," "The Killing Game," "Prey," "Message in a Bottle," and "Hunters."

Up next: season five!

Hidden World

In a couple of recent conversations about movies with friends, when I've mentioned that I saw Strange World, I've gotten blank stares. Not a lack of recognition for the admittedly generic title, but a lack of awareness of the movie's existence.

If you're also in that camp: Strange World is the latest film from Walt Disney animation. (Not Pixar.) It's set in an isolated valley where a sickness in the plants threatens society. The farmer Searcher Clade agrees to a subterranean expedition to seek the origin of the sickness, even though he's turned against the life of an explorer, as personified by the father who abandoned him as a child. And that's not the only family connection here, as Searcher's wife and son, Meridian and Ethan, end up along on the journey.

Disney movies have been on quite a roll for the last decade or so... and I'm sorry to say that this one isn't nearly as good as I've come to expect from them of late. But what it is is the most proudly progressive film I could possibly imagine a massive corporation like Disney putting its name to.

Strange World is, very overtly, a movie about climate change and environmentalism. It features diversity both in the casting of the voice actors and the appearance of the characters. The family at the core is interracial. It includes commentary about toxic forms of performative masculinity. And one of the characters is openly gay; we're not talking "oblique hint that we can still cut from the movie in other markets" gay, but actually expressing healthy same-sex affection and being supported without question by every other character in the movie.

But, after allowing their creative team to make a movie like this, Disney seems to have lacked the courage of their convictions to then actually market the finished product. It arrived in theaters to very little fanfare in November 2022, and was up on Disney+ barely a month later -- again, with very little fanfare. It seems that after the company's frankly very late and very tepid response to authoritarianism in Florida still kicked up an outsized culture war shit storm in response, Disney apparently chose silence this time. Maybe the right audience for Strange World will find it, maybe it won't; but at least the right-wing pitchforks won't be coming for them again.

I wish I could muster up more than just mild disappointment for that, but the movie isn't so great that I want to ride that enthusiastically to its defense. It's decent, but its reach exceeds its grasp; there are lot of lofty ideas in the mix here and they aren't all woven in gracefully. It lacks the emotion of Encanto, doesn't have the pure message of Frozen, isn't as clever as Zootopia... though maybe it's unfair to expect every Disney animated feature to keep rising to those standards.

It does look as great as those movies; better, even. The visuals of Strange World are wild, colorful, lush, and detailed. The setting is a great use of animation; you don't need talking animals or magic when the setting itself allows the artists to indulge their creativity. The cast is solid, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Jaboukie Young-White, Gabrielle Union, Dennis Quaid, and Lucy Liu.

I suppose I'd put Strange World right on the cusp of a recommendation, rating it a B-. But I wish I felt like it would be more memorable in the long run for all the barriers it's (quietly) breaking.

Voyager Flashback: One

Kenneth Biller had quite the run on Star Trek: Voyager. He went from story editor in season one to showrunner in season seven. And in the middle of that, near the end of season four, he directed the episode "One."

When Voyager encounters a vast nebula that poses an extreme hazard to the crew's health, a plan emerges when they discover Seven of Nine is immune to the nebula's effects. The entire crew will be placed in stasis, with only Seven and The Doctor guiding the ship. But Seven is unaccustomed to such solitude, hard-pressed to keep up with the deterioration of the ship's systems, and may not actually be wholly immune to the effects of the nebula.

It's interesting that a writer would be in the director's chair for this episode, because to me this is a prime example of the writers of a show not realizing what the most interesting aspect of a story idea is. Here, there's a chance to really dig into what it's like for Seven of Nine to deal with isolation after life in a collective. That element is here, of course... but only centered near the very end of the episode, as she has the Doctor to interact with almost the entire time.

Seven's doubts and fears, as personified by hallucination of her own crew mates taunting her, feel like the real meat on the bones of this story. But most of the final acts are spent on her interactions with an alien (who turns out to be hallucinated too). Bryan Fuller, member of the writing staff, said in an interview that they were going for The Shining here. But the ominous threat of the alien seems a retread of the recent "Retrospect" episode, and the script seems more centered on the mystery of the alien than the psychology of Seven. I guess what it really is for me is: anyone would struggle with this level of isolation, and the episode doesn't get deeply enough into that, much less how hard that would be for Seven in particular.

But it's not like the episode is way off the mark. While Seven's isolation is undercut by the Doctor's presence, the fact remains that the Doctor and Seven make a good pairing. It plays to the Doctor's self-inflated ego that he thinks he's "mastered" social interaction enough to "teach" Seven. This makes for a great opening scene in which Seven bulldozes through a simulated conversation as though seeking the end of a quest. (Though if the holodeck can be used to simulate the crew for social interactions, why doesn't Seven do that to cope with isolation in the rest of the episode?) It also works for the rapport between the Doctor and Seven to fracture over time; they're cordial, but Seven isn't really "friendly" with anyone, and that's fun to explore. (Janeway even goes so far as to call her "insolent," though she softens it by saying "she wants to do well by us.") 

Jeri Ryan anchors the episode well. She's in nearly every scene of the episode, and her arc of emotional decline is charted well over the hour. Her rapport with Robert Picardo as the Doctor is fun, as usual. And the rest of the cast seems to have a lot of fun playing the sinister, mocking versions of their characters as Seven imagines them. (I can believe that an entire "Collective" of mocking voices is what Seven would imagine.)

Other observations:

• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan looms so large in Star Trek that it works to just call a nebula "Mutara class."

• It's interesting that the crew finds a month of stasis so unthinkable, when sleeper ships used to be the way people got around the galaxy. (Heck, you vaguely alluded to Khan in this very episode.)

• Nothing about Paris' claustrophobia in this episode makes sense to me. We've seen him wear a spacesuit before several times with no talk of this condition. And how is it possible to wake oneself out of stasis and leave the pod?

• It's a good use of the seldom-mentioned biological components in Voyager to have the ship, in its own way, fall prey to the same disease as the crew.
  

I'd say overall that "One" is a good enough episode; I'd give it a B. But I feel like a more serious exploration of the psychology here, minimizing the mystery, could have made for a great episode.

Hail to the King?

Writer-director Baz Luhrmann has landed everywhere on the spectrum for me. Moulin Rouge remains, to this day, one of my very favorite movies. His Romeo + Juliet was pretty good. But Australia was bone dry, and I now remember it as even worse than I apparently thought when I saw it; I haven't gone out of my way to see one of his movies since. But I suspected I'd get around to Elvis eventually, and having it show up on the slate of Best Picture Oscar nominees made "eventually" come now.

Elvis is, obviously, a biopic of singer Elvis Presley that covers his career from discovery to death. It's over two-and-a-half hours long -- and in true Baz Luhrmann fashion, has enough glitz, flash, and glamour to fill twice that amount of time and space. And even though one of America's most beloved actors, Tom Hanks, has a key role throughout, the one everyone is talking about is Elvis himself, Best Actor nominee Austin Butler.

But first, Luhrmann -- who is up to his usual antics here. Elvis features wild split screens, odd juxtapositions, nested flashbacks, direct address to camera... all manner of cinematic tricks. These things aren't rare or revolutionary, but you don't see them often, and you certainly don't see them all in the same movie. This big "grab bag" approach to making the movie helps shake up the biopic genre, which can be pretty rigid.

Yet it often does feel like just "cinematic tricks" in Elvis. All this style is evident everywhere, to the exclusion of substance. Perhaps this movie would mean more to me if I were just a bit older and could truly have known the real Elvis Presley's career? In any case, I just found the emotion really lacking all throughout the movie. Elvis felt to me like it lived in the long shadow cast by Moulin Rouge, almost like another director doing an homage and falling short of the original genius.

Although... I can readily believe that Austin Butler gives one of the five best performances of 2022, and if you're interested in that? You really have to see Elvis. Plenty of performers have impersonated other celebrities on film, running the gamut from "fastidious accuracy" to "passable pastiche." But even the people on the accurate side of things can't always put together the whole package -- speech, look, mannerisms. And even many who do can  feel like they've crossed some sort of line into caricature.

Austin Butler somehow manages to just be Elvis (at least, to my eyes and ears). And of course, he has singing in the mix to up the degree of difficulty. (And lip syching. Reportedly, some of the performances in the movie are a fusion of Elvis' real vocals with Butler's take.) In a movie that's over the top in almost every way, this performance as Elvis Presley somehow, impossibly, comes off as one of the most grounded and realistic elements.

Still, that's just one element in a decidedly mixed bag. Elvis hasn't really turned me back around on Baz Luhrmann again; I'd give it a C overall. But I will be curious to see if it takes home any awards on Oscar night.

Prodigy: Supernova, Part 2

Finally, I've reached the season finale of Star Trek: Prodigy! (Pay no mind that it was released nearly five weeks ago.)

The Protostar crew takes desperate action to try to stop the destruction of the Starfleet armada. Not everyone may survive. And even if they do, a reckoning awaits for them at Starfleet Command.

This was a largely satisfying end to the season-long story arc of Prodigy, and it charted a different path doing it than other current Trek series doing these kinds of arcs. Where Picard and Discovery really aim to tie things off fully, reintroducing a new arc for the next season, Prodigy kept plenty in play. So while part of me is a little annoyed that we spent so much time on Admiral Janeway's quest to find Chakotay, more of me is glad that that story element will inform next season (which won't have to start with some new galactic jeopardy).

It's also interesting that our heroes never caught up with Asencia (nor even mentioned her at all). But then, Gwyn has a quest mapped out for next season that can certainly bring her back into that villain's orbit. And speaking of villains, I do like the time travel twistiness of the idea that Gwyn can now go reconcile with another version of her father -- a version who, unlike the child-enslaving nemesis of season one, I believe can be redeemed. Plus, John Noble can stay on the show.

Another actor who will stay on the show, of course, is Kate Mulgrew -- despite the noble sacrifice of Holographic Janeway. Because a form of "the character" will still be around, I didn't find the death to be a full-on tear-jerker. Still, it was effective and moving. The real Janeway, of course, would sacrifice herself for her crew without thinking twice. Holo Janeway is that person in this key sense, and the Protostar kids have become her crew over the course of a season. So I found it a lovely element of this finale.

All that said, the pacing did feel a little odd to me for this episode. Supernova really should be taken as a single one-hour episode rather than two parts, two half-hours -- because that leaves this installment wrapping up the crisis weirdly early to make way for a lot of mop-up afterward. There were a few things that didn't really make sense to me. The kids survived in a stripped-down shuttle for a whole month? (I guess it couldn't have been that stripped-down. It didn't have seats, but must have had a replicator.) Admiral Janeway never got a chance to confront Admiral Jellico, after he was built up as a bit of an adversary for her?

But overall, this finale -- and indeed, this season of Star Trek: Prodigy -- did a lot within a format that is fundamentally meant to be a kids' show. I give "Supernova, Part 2" a B+. While I won't be looking forward to the next season of Prodigy in the way I await seasons of the other new Trek series, I expect I'll keep on watching when it does arrive.